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PART One
The Creation of a New Object of Religious Devotion
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Chapter I
The Birth of the Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus1
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The creative source of Christianity was the faith in the risen and glorified Jesus. How did this faith arise? How did there come into being a consciousness of a new object of religious devotion, i.e. Jesus, who had triumphed over death and had become the Christ on the right hand of God?
The death of Jesus on the cross seemed to make definite shipwreck of all the expectations which he had planted in the hearts of his disciples. Soon, however, these hopes were destined to be recreated, enriched with greater assurance than ever before, and founded on the certitude that the master had won a definite victory over death. The church expressed and defended this faith in a cycle of stories which stretch from the death of Jesus to his ascension. The relationship between the faith and the stories is not quite so simple as has been traditionally thought. The stories not only provide the foundation for the faith; they express it and at the same time defend it.
The facts are not unimportant. But even if they could be stated and defined with greater accuracy than is possible, they would not in themselves explain the creation of the faith. If nothing had happened except that the disciples had been the victims of an illusion and had persuaded themselves that their master had returned to life, the appearance of a new religion founded on faith in the resurrection would be capable of explanation. If some document were discovered and established beyond all possibility of dispute that the body of Jesus slowly decomposed in the grave where it had been laid, Christianity with all the gifts of spiritual life which it has given to mankind would not be destroyed. On the other hand, if it were possible to prove that on the morning of the third day the body of Jesus was no longer in the tomb and every possibility of fraud had been excluded, it would not follow that those who were forced to admit this fact would on that account become Christians. A fact means nothing without some interpretation put upon it.
The purpose of studying the stories of the resurrection must be to extract the factual elements on which the faith depended, to outline the character of this faith, and to describe the psychological process which created it.
When Jesus had to allow the possibility of his death to intrude upon his visions of the future, he did not think of it as a check to his work but considered that God would cause him to return on the clouds of heaven as the glorious Messiah. He did not foresee a renewal and continuation of his work on the level of this worldâs economy but its extension in the realised kingdom of God.
1.âThe Burial of Jesus
Two traditions concerning the burial of Jesus must be distinguished. One refers to what can be called the ritual burial. It would have taken place not to perform a last act of respect to the crucified but solely to avoid transgressing the commandment of Deuteronomy (xxi. 23) which forbids one allowing the sun to rest on the corpse of a criminal.1 Those who, according to this tradition, buried Jesus were only concerned that his body should not remain exposed and so had no other reason for marking with accuracy the place where they laid it. The other tradition refers to what may be called the honourable burial. It was done in an honourable way in a tomb which could be found again. This tradition alone is portrayed in the stories but there survive distinct traces of the other tradition. In the gospel of Peter (3-5) Herod declares that, if Joseph of Arimathea had not asked for the body of Jesus, the Jews would have buried him to prevent the violation. of the precepts of Deuteronomy. The incident of the crudfragium in the Fourth Gospel (xix. 31-37) has the same significance. The Jews obtain permission from Pilate to break the legs of the crucified to hasten their death because they wanted to be able to bury the bodies of the criminals before sunset. These two extracts only prove that the Jews would have buried the body of Jesus, even if no one had undertaken to do it himself. We have, however, more direct evidence of a ritual burial in the book of Acts which makes Paul say âFor they that dwell at Jerusalem and their rulers ⊠desired Pilate that he should be slain and when they had fulfilled all that was written of him they took him down from the tree and laid him in a sepulchreâ (xiii. 27-29). The tradition referring to the ritual burial must have been very much alive to have left traces in a book by a writer, who in his gospel had related the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea.
The theme of an honourableburial is found in the canonical gospels and in the gospel of Peter1 but with significant variations. First of all there are variations concerning the personality of the man who took charge of the burial. Joseph of Arimathea is named in all the texts but only Mark and Luke say that he was a member of the Sanhedrin. Luke gives a further detail, it is true, by saying that he was not associated with the designs and acts of his colleagues. They both say that he âwas waiting for the kingdom of Godâ, which means that he was a religious Jew. Matthew calls him a disciple and John2 reconciles the two traditions by saying that he was a disciple of Jesus but a secret one, because he feared the Jews.3 Concerning the tomb there are also variations.4 Matthew, Luke, and John give the detail that it had never been used before, which Mark seems to ignore. John says that it was âin a garden in the place where Jesus was crucifiedâ.5 Peterâs gospel has left a trace of this when it speaks of the sepulchre being called âgarden of Josephâ (24).
Mark says that Joseph bought a shroud and wrapped the body of Jesus in it before putting it in the tomb. Neither Matthew nor Luke mention the purchase of the shroud but Matthew gives the information that it was new. In John things happen less simply. Nicodemus brings a hundred pounds of a mixture of myrrh and aloes with which he buries the body of Jesus wrapping it up with bandages. None of the stories give any indication that the burial of Jesus might have been incomplete and only provisional.
The story of the anointing at Bethany whether in the form in which we find it in Mark (xiv. 3-9) and Matthew (xxvi. 6-13) or as we find it in John (xii. 1-8) has some connection with those traditions about the burial which tell of the intervention of a woman. It is difficult to find in them any element of solid evidence as the anointing of corpses was apparently not a Palestinian custom.
Although there is nothing in the story of the burial itself to suggest the idea that the burial was only provisional,1 Mark (xvi. 1) and Luke (xxiii. 56; xxiv. 1) say that the women came to the sepulchre on the morning of the third day in order to anoint the body with spices which they had brought.2
The two traditions about the burial cannot be independent. One is the transformation of the other. It is impossible to understand how the tradition of an honourable burial would have become nothing more than a story of a ritual burial without any certain information concerning the position of the tomb. But an evolution of the traditions in the reverse direction is natural, guaranteeing the identity of the tomb and eliminating the harsh suggestion that the body of Jesus was completely deserted by his own friends. At first it is timidly suggested that Jesus was buried by friends through the intervention of someone who was otherwise unknown in the gospel story and in the early church. Only gradually, as the tradition develops, this person comes to be thought of as a disciple. In these circumstances it cannot be doubted that the tradition concerning merely a ritual burial must be regarded as the earlier. From its transformation came the idea of an honourable burial. The earlier tradition in default of all positive evidence sprung from the fact that the narrators presumed that the Jews treated the body of Jesus in exactly the same way as they usually treated the bodies of criminals. In addition to this there is no particular reason to doubt that this is what happened.
2.âThe Third Day And The Empty Tomb
The earliest statements of the faith, that of 1 Corinthians xv. 4, speaks of Christ being risen on the third day. If we have here an early element of the tradition, it does not follow that it is a primitive element. The expression âthe third dayâ is found three times in Matthew (xvi. 21; xvii. 23; xx. 19) and twice in Luke (ix. 22; xviii.33) in the triple declaration concerning the sufferings, death, and resurrection of the Son of Man, but Mark (viii. 31; ix. 31; x. 34) three times has the phrase âAfter three daysâ; Matthew is also aware of this expression as he alludes to it in xxvii. 63, to recall the prophecy of the resurrection. It has been maintained that the two expressions âthe third dayâ and âafter three daysâ are equivalent to each other. Actually they are sometimes in the Septuagint but not always as, e.g. in Hosea vi. 2 where âthe third dayâ is the equivalent of âafter two daysâ and not âafter threeâ.1
Matthew also has this logion, âFor as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whaleâs belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earthâ (xii. 41). No interpretation however subtle can harmonise this statement with the idea that Jesus was buried on Friday night and rose again on Sunday morning. The tradition therefore originally was not as precise as it had already become in I Corinthians xv. 4. It is possible that the two phrases âthe third dayâ and âafter three daysâ were at first used without any d...
